Exploring Teacher Written Feedback and Student Revisions on ESL Students’ Writing

strategies that can help students to improve their writing skill. However, due to constraints, such as, time constraint and large number of students to attend to, teachers often find it difficult to provide feedback on students' written work. One of the ways that teachers can adopt in facilitating student revisions is through teacher written feedback. Past studies have shown that both teachers and students value teacher written feedback in the language classroom. This study investigates the effects of teacher written feedback on undergraduates' writing in an English L2 classroom at Universiti Malaysia Perlis, a local university in Malaysia. This study explores the use of three types of feedback-suggestion, criticism, and praise and which type of feedback from these three encourages student revisions. Mixed-method research design is used to obtain the data for this study. The success of revisions is discussed in terms of length and overall improvement in the revised compositions. This study reveals that all types of teacher written feedback encourage student revisions. In addition, findings also show that criticism type of feedback results in more successful revisions as it is more specific. The questionnaire also proves that students have positive attitude towards teacher written feedback.